Resident Evil. Retribution (11 page)

Did they have nuclear weapons on them, he wondered? It seemed unlikely, at this point. But who knew what
else
they might contain. Might be a real handy thing to have, a sub like that. Just let the Undead try to get at you in there.

Then Luther shook his head sadly. That was the first thought that came to a man, now, when he walked into a new place.
If I can’t eat it or have sex with it… then how does it help me survive? How does it protect me from the Undead?

The others were double-timing across the pens to catch up with Leon. Luther easily kept pace—running was something he was good at. He spoke up as they reached the shadow of the first big submarine.

“That’s some hardware…” he began.

“Typhoon class,” Sergei said blandly. “Biggest nuclear subs the Soviets ever built. Umbrella used them to transport bio-weapons all over the globe. Secretly of course.”

“How come you know so much about Umbrella?”

“I used to work for them,” Sergei replied. “For a boy from Murmansk, it was a good job.” He added thoughtfully, “Now I like to consider it a youthful indiscretion.”

Luther snorted.

“You used to work for the bad guys—but
I’m
the one nobody trusts?” He shook his head, but let it drop.

Sergei shrugged as Leon rejoined them, looking at his countdown watch.

“Let’s pick up the pace!” Leon said. “We have less than ninety minutes!”

An empty street in New York City…

Except it wasn’t. Alice and Ada walked down the middle of the empty avenue, making their way around a series of abandoned vehicles.

“When do I see Luther?” Alice asked, trying to sound as if she were only mildly interested in the answer.

“The strike team will rendezvous with us in the next environment,” Ada said. “But until then, we’re on our own.”

“Of course,” Alice murmured. She’d been mostly on her own since the day she’d awakened in the mansion, out in the country, near Raccoon City.

She wondered if there were anyone left alive there—
really
alive.

Don’t think about it,
she told herself. It just led her to agonize about her part in the spread of the T-virus. She’d protected Umbrella, as their head of security, while they were developing the biowarfare pathogen in the Hive. She hadn’t known what they’d been up to, at least for much of the time—but still, was her ignorance just an excuse?

She’d failed to stop Spence from releasing the T-virus in the Hive; she’d failed to keep it from getting out of the Hive into Raccoon City. And she’d failed to stop it spreading through the world.

Stupid to blame yourself.
But she couldn’t help it. She never spoke about her feelings. Rationally, she knew it wasn’t really her fault. But still—she felt the weight of it all.

There weren’t that many people left alive who were capable of doing anything about it. Those few who remained had the fate of the human race in their hands. They had to take responsibility. There was no one else to do it. No excuse for standing on the sidelines…

There
was
a cure for the T-virus. It worked if it was injected into people early enough in the viral incubation process. But Alice had none of the formula—not at the moment. But if she could get that formula, could get it out to protect people from the T-virus, then it might make up for her past sins—for serving Umbrella.

She wondered if there was a supply of it somewhere in this facility. It seemed likely, but there was no time to find it—Ada’s countdown watch kept ticking ominously toward zero.

Before she realized it, the woman in red had moved on ahead, outpacing Alice. Some sort of movement attracted her eye, and she found herself staring at an abandoned NYPD police car, off to the left. Alice hesitated, wondering if she should simply toss a grenade into the cruiser. But making unnecessary noise might bring the troopers down on them. So she walked up to the car.

It was hard to see through the blood-splashed windows—

The back door of the cruiser flew open and a slavering Undead launched itself out at her, catching her unprepared, knocking her assault rifle from her hands. The rifle’s breach cracked on the street.

The creature’s hands closed around her throat, and its momentum knocked her onto the cold asphalt. She struggled to keep its jaws away from her face. It had once been a woman, but she couldn’t pick out any details. Its face was mostly a shaking blur up this close. The Undead stank, though, so badly that Alice gagged, the stench worsening when it opened its mouth wide, close to her face, preparing to rip into her lips with its festering jaws.

It was choking her, so that black specks darkened her vision, like a mass of disturbed flies. Alice grunted with effort, gripping the Undead’s wrists, prying them off her throat, forcing it back out of biting range. She gasped for breath, then used all the strength in her upper body to fling the thing off of her. It rolled over to her left.

Alice jumped to her feet, drew her automatic pistol—and froze, staring in shock.

The Undead was someone she knew. Or someone she’d known, once.

It was Rain Ocampo, wearing the tattered remains of an elegant party dress. Rain—who’d fought beside her in the Hive. Alice had shot Rain when the T-virus transformed her into an Undead. She’d blown her brains out.

This couldn’t be her.

But it apparently was. It was the Rain she’d killed—and the Rain who’d appeared in a slightly different form, too, in the strange dream she’d had of Todd and Becky and the coming of the Undead. Before she’d awakened in the real nightmare, the interrogation cell of the Umbrella Corporation’s undersea Arctic facility…

Clambering to her feet, Rain bared her broken teeth, let out a howl, and lunged. Acting on reflex, Alice fired a burst from the auto pistol, five bullets shattering Rain’s forehead. The creature took two shaky steps backward, and fell into the open doorway of the police car.

Seems like I have to kill Rain every so often,
Alice thought dazedly.
Twice now.

Ada came stalking up to her, frowning—she had the look of an exasperated teacher.

“What happened?” she demanded.

Alice looked down at Rain’s body. The oozing, black, coagulated blood slid in big dollops like thick molasses from the shattered skull.

“I know her,” she explained. “Her name was Rain. Rain Ocampo. But—how could she be
here?”
Alice shook her head in disbelief. “She died years ago…”

“You sure of that?”

“I should be. I killed her.” Strictly speaking, the T-virus had killed her. But Alice had killed her… more thoroughly.

“Not her,” Ada said, looking ruefully at the corpse. “Just someone that looked like her. How do you think Umbrella populates these test scenarios? Hundreds of people are killed each time they run a simulation. It’s pretty hard to find volunteers.”

“Clones…”

“That’s right,” Ada said. “Umbrella has fifty standard models. They take them out of the deep freeze, and imprint them with basic memories. Just enough to ensure a correct emotional response to the threat of the biohazard.” She looked at Rain’s dead face. “One time she’s a tourist in Beijing, the next, a businesswoman in New York. The next…”

“A soldier working for Umbrella,” Alice interrupted. “All those Umbrella troops. They’re all clones?”

“Of course,” came the reply. “What could be better? The perfect soldiers—limitless in number, no questions asked, and loyalty guaranteed.” With that, Ada turned away and started off again, toward the egress. After a moment, Alice followed, and as she did, memories sparked in her mind—of the clones she’d encountered, lying butchered in a ditch, outside an Umbrella base.

Clones of… Alice.

Alice corpses. It had made her sick to look at them.

Striding along behind, Alice remembered—all of it.

She’d broken into the facility, and found a whole laboratory devoted to developing Alice clones. Someone at Umbrella had been obsessed with Alice. Dr. Sam Isaacs had been convinced there was something special in her genes, something they could use to develop a purer form of the T-virus—both as a cure, and a method for creating the intelligent Undead. He created countless Alice clones, and became infected with a version of the T-virus. One which transformed him into a fusion of monster— and superhuman.

Isaacs had kept Alice trapped, until one of her clones killed him, slicing and dicing him in a laser-trap. So Alice had killed him—and then again, it wasn’t Alice at all.

The clones themselves were all killed when Wesker blew up the Tokyo facility. All of those other versions of herself—snuffed out. All those dead “Alices” lying discarded in that desert ditch, awaiting a mass burial.

And now
these
clones—killed routinely as part of someone’s little war game, their own little biowarfare “reality show.” Or trained to live and die as conditioned “troopers.” Such was Umbrella’s contempt for human suffering—it used them up like cattle.

Cattle?

It wouldn’t surprise her, if this continued, if they made clones for protein. For food…

Before the T-virus had destroyed most of civilization, there had been talk of corporate cultures. Corporations were, after all, the defining paradigm of the modern world, back in those days. A corporate culture affected thousands, even millions of people. Some were relatively benevolent. But others were sick. Pathological.

Umbrella’s corporate culture was
beyond
sick. It took ruthlessness to new, unspeakable extremes. Umbrella behaved like a technocratic serial killer.

At that moment, Alice realized it wouldn’t be enough to get the cure for the T-virus. No, not while Umbrella still was around. The corporation was going to have to be destroyed. Eradicated.

The serial killer would have to be executed.

In the control room, the dead bodies had been dragged out of the way, stacked neatly against a back wall for the maintenance bots to remove. No ceremony was needed—there were always more where those came from.

Jill tapped furiously at the keyboard, shifting through different surveillance camera views. She paused at the shot of a false building front, several blocks high, on the Moscow test floor. A messy complex of high-tech scaffolding, with cables and buttresses, held it all together.

No sight of the intruders here. Just a sense of the theatrical falseness of the test floors.

She shifted security cameras, choosing a view of Moscow’s “Red Square.” The square was apparently deserted; even the Undead were absent. Yet it seemed populated by ghosts, somehow—perhaps because the shell of the Arctic facility had been built by the Soviets. She could almost imagine the USSR’s military parades, its tanks and stiffly marching lines of soldiers in crimson and dun. She wondered what the real Red Square looked like, now. Most likely it was in ruins, with much-chewed skeletons littering the ground, Undead roaming, groaning to themselves in hunger…

On the screen, however, the façade of Red Square’s glory still stood unblemished: reproductions of the heroic paintings by Surikov and Yuon, the rebuilt Kazan Cathedral, St. Basil’s with its onion domes, the Kitai Gorod merchant’s quarter, the radiating streets, the palatial official residence of the president, the monument to Minin and Posharsky

The ghostliness actually came from the mists, she realized—cold wraiths of fog that trailed over the ground, sometimes seeming to form human figures before disintegrating into wisps.

Wait…

There. Entering the test floor, through “Resurrection Gate,” walking across the big open space of the square. Five men, heavily armed, were moving into camera range. Jill adjusted the surveillance equipment to take her closer, and ramped up the sound till she could hear them talking.

The tall black man was checking his watch.

“One hour left,” he said.

“In a hurry to meet your lady friend?” another responded.

“Don’t worry, we meet her in the next environment…” said a third, his eyes wide as he peered around the square. His accent revealed Russian heritage.

Jill nodded to herself.

“I guess we know where to find our prisoner now,” she muttered to herself. Then she turned to a subordinate. “Trooper, where’s that welcome party?” She smiled icily. “Let’s not keep our guests waiting.”

The African-American trooper clone looked up from the console.

“Beginning now,” he said. The screen in front of him flashed:

MOSCOW SCENARIO 12B ACTIVATED.

“Welcome wagon has been arranged,” the trooper added.

“Good,” Jill murmured.

The trooper’s screen, previewing scenario 12B, showed a variety of monstrous creatures: T-virus variants, mutated test subjects, including the Las Plagas Undead… and Lickers.

Seeing the Lickers, Jill shuddered.

“I hate those things,” she muttered. She turned to the other troopers. “Now let’s move out. We have a fugitive to run down. And a traitor to kill.”

It was night in Red Square.

No—it was merely shadowy in the mock-up of Red Square. But it felt real to Luther.

“Can’t believe how real all this looks.”

“That’s the point,” Sergei said. But his words rang hollow—the usual cockiness wasn’t there. He seemed spooked by this reproduction of a hallowed place from his home country.

“Always wanted to visit Moscow…” he intoned. Then he tensed.

They heard vehicles approaching, engines gunning, wheels screeching on streets.

Leon signaled a halt, scanning in the direction of the sound.

“Defensive positions!”

At the other side of the square, six motorcycles skidded to a halt. Luther stared at the riders. They weren’t quite human—he could see that from here. But they didn’t look Undead, either. For one thing, while their skin looked cold and dead, they didn’t have the extreme decay. And their eyes glowed fiery red. And another thing—they could ride motorcycles. No Undead had it that much together.

So
what the hell are they?

Whatever they were—they weren’t friendly. They were all armed, and one of them even had a chainsaw, which it started with a guttural roar. It scraped the blade along the surface of the square, yielding a shower of sparks. And it grinned hideously…